• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 365 0

this lifestyle over an easier one wouldn’t matter in the moment when the goats had eaten the spring lettuce, there was nothing left in the root cellar, the drinking water was muddy with runoff, and there was no money under the couch for gas to get to town—not to mention that Jeep’s registration had expired, and we had no savings account, trust fund, or health insurance policy, no house in town to fall back on. We were living the way much of the world actually lives. On the other hand, we didn’t have phone, water, or electrical bills; health insurance premiums; or a mortgage, a car payment, or any other monthly payment, for that matter. No one could come to shut off our utilities and take away our home.

Mama nodded at Papa over the dinner table and smiled, salad dressing shining on her lips. When eating a good meal, with our feet under our own table, we felt that we were, indeed, royalty.

“And applesauce for dessert,” Mama said with a wink.

I hover close here because I understand that our survival lay in that exchange, and in the precarious balance of Mama’s and Papa’s emotional investment in our lifestyle. To succeed at this life, they had to constantly feed their vision of it, or it would wither and die.

Chapter Four

Seclusion

Eliot, Sue, and Lissie pose for the Wall Street Journal (Photographer unknown.)

By Christmas Day the ground was covered in thirty inches of snow, a few crystals still suspended in the air out the front windows. Papa brought in a spindly-branched fir tree, and Mama and I decorated it by threading strings of popcorn interspersed with shriveled red hawthorn berries.

“It helps to think of Christmas as in ancient times, of bringing light to the dark of the year,” Mama said.

Those darkening days of December filled us with the urge to hibernate like the animals. Hands turned clumsy, pulses sluggish, and we moved as slowly as the pale red-and-black-spotted ladybugs that clung to the interior walls of the farmhouse. It was the time to turn inward for strength to combat the blues Papa said came with lack of light and vitamin D.

The darkest stretch was from Papa’s birthday on December 15 to Mama’s birthday on February 7, the shortest day being the winter solstice, a week after Papa’s birthday, when the radio reported less than eight hours of light. We followed the sun’s progress across the sky like a baby following his mother’s face, willing her to stay nearby. As early as four in the afternoon, Papa would light the kerosene lanterns with a poof of flame, turning down the knob of the fancy one until its cheesecloth wick glowed a winter blue. It whistled like wind in the trees and filled the little farmhouse with a steady glow as the last of the moths pounded the windowpanes, drawn like us to the light.

Mama wrapped our gifts in newspaper, tied with garden twine. Other gifts came by mail wrapped in silver and gold foil and colorful paper with big bows and notes that said “From Skates” and “From Grandma and Grandpa.” Papa grinned his elfin smile that evening as he took down hand-knitted stockings and I tore through the wrappings like any child. My favorite gift was a painted wooden Russian doll Helen and Scott had brought back from a recent trip to Russia. Inside it was an identical-shaped doll, and so on, until at the very center was the solid smallest doll. The shells lay around me empty and broken open, but the baby fit into the space of my closed hand, a comforting shape inside.

“That one is the heart,” Mama said, her own feeling tender during the dark of the year. “Let’s put it back in to be safe.”

“People give us too much,” she wrote later in her journal, overwhelmed by the material bounty. “Decided to fast (me apples and simple raw protein, Eliot tea, water, Liss mostly milk).”

The solitude and simple rhythms of the homesteading life suited Mama’s spirit well, but as it turned out, the winter of 1971 was the peak of our quiet years, as spring would bring a visit from the Wall Street Journal that would change our lives in unforeseen ways.

Papa woke in the darkness before sunrise,